Actually booting into safe mode, taking ownership of windows.old and all subs and then right-clicking delete worked for me every time. Even for the nasty Intel driver that remains after a cleanup. I heard it's a permission issue not that the file is actually still being used like reported by windows explorer.
Thank you Brink! Option 3 (boot to command prompt) worked on 2 computers but did not work on a 3rd computer. RMDIR /S C:\Windows.old accessed the system reserved partition rather than the C: partition and therefore could not find the Windows.old folder. How do I correct this? I do not want to delete the system reserved partition and risk corrupting the boot process.
Just running Disk Cleanup on C-drive should remove the windows.old folder. Start it up, then choose System files, and then check all the options....then run it.....not that hard. :)
I can't say about deleting the full Windows.old folder using the applet Unlocker because I deleted mine by using Windows 10' "Disk Cleanup" located in "Windows Adminstrative Tools" Sub-Folder but a few remaining files that "Disk Cleanup" couldn't get rid of could be easily deleted using Unlocker during the next boot.
I ran cleanmgr initially. It did NOT remove the windows.old folder. Insufficient permissions...access denied...etc. Method 3 posted by Brink(boot to command prompt) did work on other computers that had been upgraded to Windows 10 but not this one for the reason I noted in the original post. (cmd accesses "system reserved" partition rather than C partition)
UPDATE: I was able to delete this folder from within Windows using unlocker 1.9.2
The question of how to make a command prompt at boot find the C partition rather than the system reserved partition is a matter for another day.
Last edited by jhcarver; 27 Dec 2015 at 12:07. Reason: RESOLVED
There seems to be nothing new being reported over here now as all avenues have been discovered and used.
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